An Essence of the Dusk, 5th Edition eBook

[11] In Sanskrit, hunting and wooing
can be mixed up
together by plays on words.

[12] An emperor. Hindoo idols
are dressed and undressed,
like dolls, by their officiating
priests.

[13] She means, he was her Creator.

[14] The Hindoos have no word, because
they have not the idea, of an idol.
They call it a god or an image.
Our word idol implies the antagonism to
paganism involved in Christianity, and no two books
are more alike than S. Augustine’s City
of God and Ward’s Hindoo Mythology.

V.

So as he listened, Aja’s soul was filled as
it were with a mingled essence of wonder and irresolution
and sheeny beauty and singing sound. For the
tone of her voice was like a lute, and before his eyes
hovered a picture of waving arms and witching curves,
out of which her dreamy eyes, from which he could
not take his own, seemed as it were to speak to him
of love reproachful and old regret. And all at
once, with a violent effort, he roused himself as
if from sleep with open eyes. And he shifted
his sword to the other hand, and passed his right across
his brow. And he said, in some confusion:
O thou strange and sweet-tongued woman, certain this
much is, that I am filled by thee with emotion that
I do not understand. And yet I know not what to
think, or even say. For even apart from the promptings
of a former birth, thy beauty and thy haunting voice,
which I seem as it were to have heard before, are quite
sufficient to rouse emotion even in a stone, much more
in a man of flesh and blood.

Then she shook her head sadly, looking at him with
glistening eyes; and she said, with a smile of ineffable
sweetness: Ah! this is as I thought, and the
instinct of thy former birth is clouded over and effaced,
by thy meeting with this other woman in the morning
of this very day. Alas! how small, how very small,
the interval of space and time that divides the paradise
of joy from the dungeon of despair! For had this
our reunion been sooner by only a single day, I should
have caught thy heart before it had been occupied
by this all too fortunate other woman, who now holds
it like a fortress, garrisoned by a prior claim.
But what is this priority of claim? Can she,
who by thy own confession has known thee only a single
day, dare to dispute priority with the darling of thy
former birth[15]? Wilt thou break thy faith with
me, to keep thy faith with her? Aye! and wilt
thou, after all, gain so much by the exchange?
Is she beautiful, then, this other woman? But
I am beautiful, too? And she stood up, and looked
at Aja with her head thrown back and proud eyes, as
though to challenge his condemnation of her own consummate
beauty. And she said again: Is she, then,
this other beauty, either more faithful or more beautiful
than I am? Speak, and tell me if thou canst,
in what I am inferior, or why I am to be despised,
in comparison with her.